Maya 2014 In Review

Maya 2014

I'm personally very fond of Autodesk Maya and have been for the better
part of a decade. First some intro...

Autodesk Maya 2014 is the latest release of
Autodesk Maya (redundant, but all fact). For those not
familiar with Autodesk Maya, it serves as the central
production hub for high-end 3D digital content creation. In their
own words:

"Autodesk® Maya® 3D animation software offers a
comprehensive creative feature set for 3D computer animation,
modeling, simulation, rendering, and compositing on a highly
extensible production platform. Maya now has next-generation
display technology, accelerated modeling work flow, and new tools
for handling complex data."

Autodesk Maya is used by everyone, everywhere for just
about everything (I'm not even kidding). ILM, Weta, Pixar, Blizard,
Epic Games, SPI, Dreamworks - You'll find Maya. If you've watched a
feature film, played a video game or watched TV in the last 15
years - chances are you've seen Maya in action (Technically it
wasn't Autodesk Maya at first, but the product is
basically the same - actually, it's significantly better due to the
massive influx of R&D capital Autodesk has invested over the
years). In short, Autodesk Maya is a big deal.

Great! Autodesk 3ds Max comes as a choice for the
suite's hub application! You get to pick your hub application!
Choose either 3ds Max or Maya and the rest of the
suite is the same. Bump up to the "premium" version of
the suite, they'll throw in Autodesk Softimage. Everybody
gets Mudbox, MotionBuilder and
Sketchbook, along with all the other little utility apps.
Not good enough? Go with the "ultimate" version and you
get both 3ds MaxandMaya.

If you're setting up a 3D production pipeline, the only other
software you'd have to buy would be Adobe Photoshop and
you're set. (If you're making games you'll also need a game engine,
but for game asset creation the Autodesk Entertainment Creation
Suite has you freakin' covered.)

Now some substance...

What's new in Maya 2014

A lot! This year, we got a lot of usability
enhancements and several slick new tools. No major new modules this
time around, but a plethora of little niceties everywhere. For more
details, see the links at the end of the article. I picked just a
handful of stuff touch on in this review, including:

Grease Pencil

Node Editor Improvements

Modeling Toolkit - Quad Draw

Edit Edge Flow Tool

Paint Effects Geometry Interactions

Unfortunately, I can only touch on some of what is new. The
actual list of what's new is almost as long as this review.

Grease Pencil - "It's work
related!"

The new Grease Pencil tool is a great way to waste time
sketching doodles of "work related" content. Seriously, I
lost hours due to this tool. Everyone who test drove 2014 was
sketching "work related" content and making stupid little
stop-motion animations of everything. I'm sure when the 'it's new'
factor wears off, things will get back to normal. Everybody loves
this tool and it is quite useful for blocking out a shot.

Image courtesy Autodesk.

With the Grease Pencil you basically sketch out a previs of your
animation in camera space with on-screen pencils, markers, etc.
This works for any camera - even orthographic and spectroscopic
cameras. It also works with any user created camera. It behaves
correctly with the undo system and works with the timeline controls
just like normal key frames (except you can't copy grease pencil
frames to another camera). It feels like a lightweight version of
Sketchbook built into every Maya camera. Super
cool. It's also pressure-sensitive and works with a tablet.

Unfortunately, it has some drawbacks. (Ha! "drawback"
- I'm amazing.) The trouble arises when your camera is the child of
an animated object. That is, if you parent your camera to a locator
and animate that locator, the grease pencil frames will fail
miserably. This is particularly vexing because camera rigs like
this are common. However, if you refrain from parenting your camera
and instead use a parent constraint, things should work
correctly:

Overall, the tool is quite useful if you work within its limits.
You can also render grease pencil frames with Maya
Software, Maya Hardware and Maya Hardware
2.0 (Not mental ray). There's a caveat to using Maya
Hardware 2.0, however: screen space based ambient occlusion
and the grease pencil are currently incompatible. If you make a
grease pencil frame it kills your ambient occlusion in both the
viewport and in Maya Hardware 2.0 renders. (Insert Metal
Gear solid Alert sound.)

That said, the tool still feels a little buggy. Being new, this
is not entirely unexpected. I hope to see some fixes in future
patches. Regardless, I'm glad Autodesk shipped it because despite
its shortcomings it is still useful just as it is.

Node Editor Enhancements

The Node Editor was already pretty cool, but it also gets some
usability enhancements this year. You can press 5 on your keyboard
to cycle through different node labels. You can press 1-4 to cycle
through different levels of detail/number of attributes shown. Node
names now appear above the node. There's a new button to
add the current selection to the node graph. (Thank
you!):

Grid snapping and add selection to node editor.(click on image for full-size)

Nodes are also color coded by type. There's a grid you can snap
nodes to and so on. Basically, no major changes but a lot
of useful little usability improvements that make it much
nicer.

Image courtesy Autodesk.

Modeling Toolkit - Quad Draw

At first sight, I though the new Modeling Toolkit was lame. It
looked like Autodesk just re-boxed the shelf into the channel box.
A new tool here and there, who cares, right?
Wrong.

It's actually very cool and a huge time saver, but not
because of the location of the tools, rather how the tools work.
The new tools like the Quad Draw behave differently. E.g: while
having the Quad Draw tool active you can still move vertices,
faces, edges, weld vertices, delete faces, append faces and more -
without any tool switching. Want to slide a vertex? Just middle
mouse drag BAM! Done. No selection or move tool needed. Want to
delete a face? Simply ctrl+lmb - gone. Need to append a face? Just
hold shift+lmb. Done.

Image courtesy Autodesk.

After using it for a few hours and switching back and forth
between Maya 2013 and Maya 2014, it was the
feature I missed the most. I'm a modeller at heart, so I especially
appreciated the new tools. In terms of overall time saved when
making base meshes or rebuilding scan data, or pretty much anything
to do with tweaking poly meshes - it's reason enough to upgrade.
The ability to basically 'paint' strips of quad polygons onto an
existing mesh is a huge time saver:

You can simply click to place vertex points, then hold down
shift and Maya shows you where it will create a new
quadrangle if you click again to complete the action.

There is more than just Quad Draw, the other tools in the
toolkit also work in a very interactive manner. The Quad Draw tool
was just coolest of them all!

Edge Flow

There's a new parametric edge adjustment tool called Edit Edge
Flow (found under Edit Mesh). It basically lets you modify an edge
loop to maintain curvature with the surrounding surface. It's like
the modern version of Oliver Beardsley's APESplit MEL script from
way back in the day. (Anyone around long enough to remember that
little gem?) You can adjust existing edge loops, or you can have
the edge flow inserted automatically for newly created edge loops.
(See various mesh editing tool settings.)

This is a huge help when modeling and a pretty decent
implementation to boot. You can still trick it into causing your
mesh to explode in unexpected ways, when dealing with very long
edge loops with high surface curvature and low poly count (think
contorted Möbius strip), but 99% of the time it does the right
thing. Under real world conditions you shouldn't have a problem. I
try to break things.

Paint Effects surface interactions

You can now have Paint Effects interact more closely with
geometry. For example, Paint Effects now supports geometry
collisions. This is easy to enable by simply selecting the
stroke+geometry and then Paint Effects -> Make Collide. The
collision detection works in real time. This helps when doing
things like positioning trees along walls, or preventing paintFX
from going through surfaces they're intended to instead grow
around.

Image courtesy Autodesk.

There's also the ability to have a surface attract a Paint
Effects stroke to affectively pull it into contact with the surface
so the growth takes place along a given surface, instead of away
from it. The attracting surface need not be the surface the Paint
Effects stroke is attached to. This is great for things like ivy,
vines and other similar vegetation.

These features add to the value of Paint Effects in immediately
usable ways. For example, positioning geometry and Paint Effects
together in architectural shots is a lot simpler. You no longer
have a tree going through a wall. However, the tool is not intended
as a full-blown dynamics simulation for hero shots. For example,
growing a tree in a confined space is cake, but running over a
forest with a steam roller at 100mph is a bit beyond the scope of
the tool... at least, I think. But they can't stop me:

Autodesk Maya 2014 spanning three monitors with viewport
2.0. Shown is the Node editor, perspective camera and a torn off
shot camera. No trees were harmed in the making of this
image.

It was pretty fun to play with in the viewport because of the
immediate feedback it provides. The collisions are also frame
independent - there is no motion history dependence, like normal
dynamics where you'd have to play back each frame in succession to
solve correctly. Instead, it just works as you position your
objects.

Yup.

While not perfect, the collision detection was a lot more robust
than I expected. The tool will enable artists to accomplish things
that in previous versions of Maya would have been
extremely time consuming and expensive. If you deal a lot with
Paint Effects, this could be your reason to upgrade.

Bottom Line

It's Autodesk Maya. In a high-end 3D
production, it's almost as critical as having electricity. Combined
with the rest of the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite
it is the 3D production. There were a lot of good
upgrades this year. I only covered a very small selection and have
probably already written too much! Maya is my personal
production hub and has been my favorite tool for almost 10 years -
seriously. This year things only got better!

-Modulok-

Be sure to check out the Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite,
also check out the 30-day free trials and watch the videos:

All supporting images are copyright, and
cannot be
copied, printed, or reproduced in any manner without written
permission

Kurt Foster (Modulok) falls somewhere between
programmer and visual effects artist. When not sifting through
technical manuals, he takes on freelance roles in both programming
and visual effects, attempting to create a marriage of technical
knowledge with artistic talent. He can be seen helping out on the
Renderosity Maya forum, when time permits.

July 8, 2013

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